Hello contestants and Mr. MikeMirzayanov, 👋
We all see that cheating is spreading so much in the contests, there are a lot of people complaining that they didn't cheat in the contest the solution of them are skipped due to the similarity between their solution and another solution, I think that happened because Div2, Div1, and Global the system is we get a pretest passed and can lock our problem and open our room and see other contestants solutions in the room, so the cheater can send the solutions to other people and the got skipped their solution without cheating.
I know that is the system of the site, I don't say that codeforces must change it, I try to pass this information on to Mr. MikeMirzayanov to help to find any solution to it.
I don't know why they use this type of checking, not like Div3, Div4, and EDU and making hacking phase 12 hours, so I will not ask for that because Mr. Mike surely has his reasons.
But let's give any suggest to try to reduce cheating in the contests here in the comment, I hope this blog to reaches you Mr. MikeMirzayanov, and found a solution for this problem.
What about making a seprate challenging/Hacking phase just like Topcoder has?
I Support this Idea
To be safe, it's better to not lock your solution. That's what I always do.
But if everyone does that, the whole hacking in-between contest becomes useless.
Actually IIRC, the solutions are revealed to people who locked regardless of whether that solution is locked or not. If this is the case, it's not a problem on whether you lock or not, right?
Another easy solution: the first person does not get skipped, but the second person does.
But it's helpful in this situation not at all, because there are a lot of cheating, and I believe that the two people who cheating must skip their solutions.
Well if they use the room the first person won't get caught and there will be someone random that gets skipped falsely, and that's worse
I have made a similar suggestion here, but it seems that people preferred short open hacking phase or removing it more than long open hacking.
Yes, because the rate take a lot of time to update after the contests.